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Friday, March 18, 2016

Academics can change the world – if they stop talking only to their peers

Research and creative thinking can change
the world. This means that academics have enormous power. But, as academics
Asit Biswas and Julian Kirchherr have warned,
the overwhelming majority are not shaping today’s public debates.

Instead, their work is largely sitting in academic
journals that are read almost exclusively by their peers. Biswas and Kirchherr estimate
that an average journal article is “read completely by no more than ten
people”. They write:

Up to 1.5 million peer-reviewed articles are published
annually. However, many are ignored even within scientific communities – 82% of
articles published in humanities [journals] are not even cited once.

This suggests that a lot of great thinking and many
potentially world altering ideas are not getting into the public domain. Why,
then, are academics not doing more to share their work with the broader public?

The answer appears to be threefold: a narrow idea of what
academics should or shouldn’t do; a lack of incentives from universities or
governments; and a lack of training in the art of explaining complex concepts
to a lay audience.